Why I Think the Disturbing Side of Halloween Deserves to Be Celebrated

I don't remember how my husband Chris and I ended up with six-month-old twins dressed as vegetables—a chili pepper and a pea pod, to be precise—the first Halloween we were parents. I'll admit the whole thing sounds very much like the result of a middle-of-the-night-nursing and Internet-browsing session. Regardless, they were pretty cute, as far as produce goes, and we wanted to show them off. At the last minute, we decided to throw on overalls (an article of clothing every good Kansan should own), dress as farmers, and take the veggies downtown, where we'd heard there was annual storefront trick-or-treating.

We did not head out the door that night intending for Halloween to become our family thing. But in our Midwestern college town, we discovered, students ranging in age from preschool to graduate school flock downtown to the local businesses, who open their doors after hours and hand out candy from cauldrons and wheelbarrows. Everyone dresses up and the restaurants overflow with happy witches and silly superheroes, nibbling candy, drinking beer, eating French fries. Neither of us had participated in the festivities before becoming parents but realized, at least in this town, you're never too old to be something for Halloween.

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Courtesy of Maria Polonchek

For the next five years, the downtown trick-or-treat tour was tradition, and our family's passion for Halloween blossomed. With Thanksgivings and Christmases in flux as we rotated between extended families, Halloween became our family's most consistent annual tradition, the holiday we made our own. The summer we moved to California, I had a harder time thinking of being away for Halloween more than any other day. And then, our first October on the West Coast, I got a package in the mail.

It was from a family friend who knew about our love for the holiday and encouraged us to keep it going in our new home, but this prop was a different take for me: I was looking at an impressively sized, grisly skeleton in a purple torn robe meant to hang midair, complete with flashing eye sockets and groaning noises. It was the kind of decoration banned in this Chicago neighborhood's HOA, the kind concerned parents write about in the editorial section of the paper.

Courtesy of Maria Polonchek

I pulled it out of the box and the child in me thought, uh… this is not allowed. Over the years, I'd unconsciously gravitated toward a "nice" version of Halloween, limiting décor to gourds and pumpkins and keeping our costumes sweet. I remember being morbidly intrigued by the scary stuff when I was young, the witches, ghosts, and goblins, but my conservative Christian upbringing had taught me that this holiday was about celebrating evil and exists for bad people who want to do bad things.

I looked at the skeleton, which was larger than my kids, had a shiver, and thought of the sender, who doesn't have children. He knows our youngest is three, right? There's no way I'm putting this up. I shoved our new roommate in the hall closet before waking my daughter from her nap and picking up my first-graders from school. I'd deal with him later.

Later came quickly, however, when that same day kicked off our rainy season and one of the boys went looking for his mud boots.

"Whoa! What is this?!?!" he cried in delight, pulling the skeleton from the closet.

As they typically do, my children surprised me that day with their freshness, their openness, their lack of judgment. In a moment I realized I was terrified of an object that they viewed as a toy. Since survey course discussions on nature versus nurture, I'd been convincing myself that I could detect social conditioning from a mile away, but here I was, projecting my experience, my fears onto my daughter, who oscillated between shrieking with laughter at the skeleton and rocking it like a baby.

"You guys like this thing?" I asked.

"Yes!" they cried. Can we please put it up?"

I stared him down through the eye sockets.

"Okay," I said, with a perspective shift that set my imagination loose. "And let's get some tombstones to go with it."

Chris and I are raising our children outside of religion. While we were both raised in Christian homes, neither of us are religious now and respect that children should be allowed to make informed choices for their own spiritual journeys as they mature. Being a secular family does not mean we aren't concerned with raising kind, compassionate kids with a strong sense of purpose and identity; it does mean that we don't believe in the supernatural, magic, or superstitions.

Courtesy of Maria Polonchek

As my children encourage me to embrace the menacing side of Halloween, I've realized that we're celebrating a subversion of expectations: If only for a day, irreverence, taboo, and defiance are the norm, something the whole family enjoys. It's a celebration of creativity and imagination, too. Without many restrictions on their costumes, the kids gravitate toward the disturbing, like the "blood princess" my six-year-old conceived of on her own. Even though we've settled in a rural area with few neighbors, we still put out the hanging skeleton and tombstones; over the years, we've added spider webs, purple lights, and a bloody, stumpy appendage. I see my children facing and embracing what they might fear and, as a result, being less afraid.

People who do believe in the supernatural, whether it's God or something else, often assume that the rest of us place the same meaning on the Halloween symbols they deem "dangerous," when we don't. Everyone is free to celebrate Halloween however they choose (or not at all), but cannot insist we all cater to their unfounded beliefs. Halloween is an important celebration to our family: a whole body of research points to the fact that holidays, rituals, and traditions, whether they are religious or not, benefit children in a number of ways, including academically, emotionally, and socially. Holidays like Halloween, with no religious baggage, are the perfect occasions for creating solid family traditions outside of religion. This is why, six years after getting that skeleton in the mail, we're still hanging him up, lining the tombstones, and celebrating our liberation from superstition and fear.

Maria Polonchek is author of In Good Faith: Secular Parenting in a Religious World(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, August 2017). Part memoir, part cultural exploration, In Good Faith examines how to raise children with a sense of identity, belonging, and meaning outside of religion.

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